The second half of Lars von Trier’s pseudo-sexual “Nymphomaniac” continues the writer-director’s senseless journey into depravity. Where “Volume 1” was at least unintentionally funny and scandalously entertaining, “Volume 2” is a flat-out bore that takes our sexually addicted heroine, Joe, from dabbling in sadomasochism to a loan shark who uses her vast sexual knowledge to shame the shirkers into paying.

It’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, maybe more so.

About the best you can say for it is that you never have a clue where von Trier is going next. In that respect, “Volume 2” is brimming with surprises, most of them shocking in their perverseness, but laughably clumsy in their execution. And in the process, von Trier manages to sully the reputations of fine actors like Jamie Bell, Stellan Skarsgard and Willem Dafoe, as well as lousy ones like Shia LaBeouf and Stacy Martin, the blank slate who played Joe through the majority of “Volume 1.” She thankfully is only back for a handful of scenes in “Volume 2” before giving way to a real actress in Charlotte Gainsbourg, who von Trier gets his jollies trying to humiliate in nude scene after nude scene.

The Danish provocateur especially takes pernicious pleasure in focusing his lurid camera on Ms. Gainsbourg’s privates, which like all the principal actors’ bits are portrayed by faceless porn-star doubles. We see Gainsbourg being whipped repeatedly by Bell, far removed from his days as sweet, dancing fool Billy Elliot. Here he plays a lucrative entrepreneur specializing in dishing out sadomasochistic treatments to women like Joe in an environ that could easily be confused with a doctor’s office, complete with a full waiting room. Watching Bell ritually strap and tape Gainsbourg to a ragged couch, propping up her rear with a pair of phone books to give his cat- o-nine-tales an easier target, is debauched, but uncomfortably funny in its absurdity.

It gets even more ludicrous when Joe begins working for Dafoe as a loan shark, especially when one of her deadbeat clients turns out to be LaBeouf (employing some sort of bizarre English accent), her estranged ex and the father of their toddler son. What are the odds? Then there’s Skarsgard’s Seligman (more like Silly-man), the middle-aged nerd who rescued Joe from an attacker and instantly became a sounding board for her life story, told in an endless series of flashbacks. In “Volume 2,” we learn a lot more about Seligman (he’s a virgin) and what he’s capable of, but like most everything else up von Trier’s sleeve it has zero impact, not to mention, makes no sense.

But then, his film is nothing but a forum for working out his psychological issues, a cinematic therapy that began with his “Antichrist,” continued with “Melancholia,” and wraps up with “Nympho.” And what has von Trier learned about himself over the course of this tryptic? I guess you’d surmise that he’s depressed, self-loathing and just generally screwed up – just like everybody else. He’s also a bit of a masochist, and understandably, his latest session on the directing couch leaves you feeling thoroughly whipped.